Karnika Sehgal 发布可玩短片《The Last Thing in the Jar》第一集

A short film you can play. Episode I of The Last Thing in the Jar.

Mikon chokes on an olive pit at his cousin's wedding and arrives at the River Styx without the coin for the ferry. The rule is a hundred years on the bank. So he waits, and for a century he watches the famous visitors go past: Orpheus singing the ferryman to tears, Theseus and Pirithous getting stuck to their chairs, Heracles walking off with the three-headed dog, Elpenor (who fell off a roof in the Odyssey), Aeneas with his golden branch, and Psyche, who is carrying two coins and has been told not to help him.

Inspired by Zach Cregger's Resident Evil (2026), which skips the famous heroes and follows an ordinary man through the edges of the legend. Mikon is the old man Psyche is warned to ignore in Apuleius. Nobody ever wrote down his name.

The game

/play is a first-person version: an open riverbank in the Underworld built like an Italian loggia, with frescoed vaults and real water. Hermes tells you the rule out loud: no coin, no boat, and the dog can smell coins. Talk to Elpenor, Theseus and Pirithous and Charon (every line is spoken, and the camera cuts to whoever is talking), find a coin, and get it past Cerberus to the ferry. Cerberus can't swim.

3D people: Quaternius Universal Base Characters, Universal Animation Library and Modular Character Outfits: Fantasy (all CC0), compressed into public/play/assets/.
Voices: recorded on-device with Kokoro (Apache 2.0) into public/play/voice/.
Cerberus is built in code (makeHound in public/play/game.js).

How the film plays

Press play and watch. The camera cuts across Renaissance paintings, every character speaks in their own voice with subtitles, and a quiet score changes with each act.
Five times the film stops and you choose what Mikon does.
At the end the Oracle tells you which Greek god you're most like, from your choices (AI).
Afterwards you can talk to Mikon, Charon, Elpenor or Heracles (AI).

How it's made

docs/episode-1-the-coin.md: the screenplay.
public/film.js: the same script, ready to play: every line, who says it, and what the camera shows.
public/shots.js: the named camera positions on each painting.
public/player.js, public/index.html: the player.
public/img/lib/: the paintings, each folder with a manifest.json (artist, title, date, location, licence, source).
public/audio/: one recording per line. scripts/voice/ records them with Workers AI text-to-speech.
src/worker.js: Cloudflare Worker for the AI cast, the Oracle's reading and its voice.

Run it

npm install
npx wrangler dev

Sources

Aristophanes, Frogs; Virgil, Aeneid 6 and Georgics 4; Ovid, Metamorphoses 10; Apollodorus, Library 2.5.12 and Epitome 1.24; Homer, Odyssey 10 to 12; Apuleius, Metamorphoses 6. Mikon, his olive pit and the oar are invented.

Picture credits

Paintings are public domain unless noted. Photographs under Creative Commons are credited on screen and in each manifest.json (photographers include Sailko, ArchaiOptix, Alvesgaspar, Carole Raddato, Kent Wang, Francesco Bini and Marie-Lan Nguyen). Agostino Carracci's Pluto is in an Italian state museum, which requires permission for commercial reproduction.

Made by Karnika Sehgal.